Jake

That way it's even more awkward when someone holds the door for a woman but not the man immediately following her, who gets a face full of beads.

Yeah MI2 had more controls over what was happening and not happening.

Hopefully working on Fez gave him a clear idea for what a sequel would be, and the only block from him making it quickly was that he had to finish the first one first... because otherwise this seems like a disastrous move. Upside: That teaser video is a super solid piece of work. Top form all around.

That is rad.

This is why my reaction is weird on the cast. The imagery of Mario and Peach fighting side by side using classic mainline Mario moves, together on the same screen, was shockingly moving to me to see. It felt profound. But that was being strangled to death by the other voice in my head which was screaming "they've been making these since you were 8 and now you're 32 why did it take them until now to do this what the fuckkk :("

The gold prequisite is exactly what we were talking about. That's for-pay multiplayer.

It's on http://idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs but its too subtle.

It was Sean!

Dota Today 1: QOP Top and POTM Bottom Are you ready to enter the exciting world of lords management? Nick Breckon and Sean Vanaman introduce Dota Today; a new Dota-centric podcast by Idle Thumbs. Queue up and call mid because our failure means your success. Game Discussed: Dota 2 Listen on the Episode Page iTunes link coming soon! Subscribe to the RSS Feed

Middle Manager of Justice and Dropchord are both games which you wouldn't know were from DF if they didn't have the logo at the start. Trenched has military guys in it, but at least it has crazy weird alien robots and an unconventional (if super super subdued) sense of humor. I expect Massive Chalice to feel like a Double Fine game in that the art is going to be spectacular and different from what a mainstream studio would do, even though it has a fantasy setting. If everything from Double Fine looked like a Scott Campbell cartoon come to life I think I would be less interested in them as a studio long-term. I think part of Double Fine's "problem" (not quite the right word) is that their games don't have anything tangible for outsiders to grab on to. If you don't already know about the team's legacy of originality and quality from Tim's LucasArts days, or from happening upon one of their past releases, their big name games don't give you a strong hook to hold on to other than "whoa this is weird looking!" I think there is a balance they can strike where the game has some inlets for people who haven't already bought in, while still offering a unique feeling that you don't get from any other developer (Costume Quest is a great example of this).

We don't check that number anymore so please email us.

It's a similar story to Cliffe and Gooseman with Counter-Strike. Though the professional gaming scene was different at that time, Counter-Strike was a tiny-team mod with very tight (public-facing) leadership which spawned a ton of impersonators and popularized the "realistic" multiplayer PC FPS. It was also known for being pretty impenetrable, being played more similarly to a sport than a traditional multiplayer game (given that most people just treated de_dust like the official CS playing field), and it was even known for having a hostile community of outsider-averse jerks. Then Valve hired them and made the sequel.

Goodbye.

Please take your interpretation of our characters* to tumblr or something. Just, please go have a satisfying life somewhere. * (note: they are actually us, we are real people, and we are all actually good friends.)

Yesterday I was thinking about how cool our forums are.

See, now this forum has a reason to exist forever. Thank you.

It's also a financial issue. With a publisher deal you typically get an advance against royalties, which in a nutshell means that all the money you're "given" to make the game is actually just the publisher giving you all your royalty money up front, which you then have to pay back later out of your sales. So, if your royalty deal is 25%, then cool, you get 25 cents for every dollar someone pays to buy the game. Except let's say the game's budget, paid for by the publisher, was $1 million. That $1 million was fronted to you as an advance out of your royalties, which means that before you see any profit you have to pay the publisher back. Simple, the game has to sell $1 million in sales because that's the game's budget, right? Not quite. Since in this hypothetical example, your royalties are 25%, that means your cut is only a quarter out of every dollar. That means that the game needs to actually make $4 million before you're paid off. In this hypothetical deal it's not until dollar $4,000,001 that you will see your first 25 cents of profit as a developer. Those numbers are totally hypothetical to make the math easy, and in real life there are way more complicating factors, but it's more than safe to assume that with most traditional game funding deals, the publisher is getting a much larger royalties percentage than the developer, and it's equally safe to assume that the funding model is an advance on royalties deal like this. That's why it's sweet to be independently funded, via self-fundjng, crowdsourcing, or other less restrictive independent financing. If you own the financing, and you then go and sell your game on Steam or whatever, the money you make is your own from the first dollar.

It sounds like their mission is "remain as financially in control of our games as possible."

For me it was the moment early on when I was with the sniper woman, out in the series of trenches looking for the weird baby creature. (I also remember no nouns from this game.) It's simple, but the woman being in communication with me the entire time, just giving me simple commands, pointing out things she saw, etc, felt more real to me because I could understand it without thinking. I only had to use one sense -- hearing -- to comprehend what the NPC was communicating in a complicated situation. That's not got much to do with plot or atmosphere, but more with (very simple) mechanics. As far as the feeling of the game, I'm sure that the cartooney Russian accented English doesn't help the tone, and I'm sure it doesn't do the story any favors either, but the English voice does let me pretend I am a person who lives in a world where there is no language barrier between me and my compatriots.

Yep!

It'll drop along with the 3 other re-recorded tracks as part of the Kickstarter album (aka The Final Piece Of The Puzzle, Without Which The Kickstarter Is Incomplete), coming soon. That's how I often perceive music as well. I remember some time in high school, I finally heard a pop song enough times that I fully comprehended the music and could sing it back. It was completely fascinating. (I sang in choir as a kid, played the piano and even a little sax in high school, and obviously when super young listened and sang along to children's records and in classrooms and things, so it's not like I don't have the capacity to understand and sing back lyrics in music, but super highly engineered ambient music played on the radio is still almost always noise to me, unless I force it to be drilled into my head in a really conscious way. When I'm sitting in a diner with friends and one of them randomly starts singing along to whatever happens to be playing in the background, it baffles me that they could hear what was being sung and pull it out of the air in an environment like that, because while I can hear and pull out the melody/other performances in the background, I'm almost unconscious that there is also someone singing.)

Really curious to see what is in part 3. Elaine from Monkey Island is the tease image for "flipping the script" on the damsel, but across the five Monkey Island games she has had a really bumpy ride, with probably the most weird stuff in the fifth game.

We used to post them around midnight or 1am pacific time, after recording and editing the episodes, but that is actually really exhausting so we don't anymore. Sorry.

I think there is talk of a "welcome new guys!" episode, but I think they mostly want to focus on current stuff happening within the game and their playing of it, which probably means that it'll be more inside most of the time.

I think it's for people who are already there. This episode doesn't go too deep/insane after listening to most of it, but here is a telling sign: The episode title, while looking like insane nonsense, actually makes sense to many who have been playing Dota for a while.Edit: I just got to the part that I can't understand at all. Still enjoying it for the enthusiasm alone. This is what Idle Thumbs must sound like to my mom.